Creating a Bootable CD With the acceptance of the “El Torito” standard for IDE CD-ROM drives, it is now possible to boot your PC from a CD and load an operating system without a floppy or hard drive. The problem is in obtaining bootable CDs to begin with. Many new computers are Creating A Bootable CD 159 ING If no SCSI hard drives are in the system, the SCSI adapter’s on-board BIOS ROM can usually be disabled. Being sold with a system disc which can boot and load an operating system, but it is rare for users to bring in their bootable CDs with the system when service is required. If you have a CD-R drive and some readily available software tools, you can actually make a bootable CD yourself. This part of the chapter covers the procedure used to create a bootable CD. Before you can create a bootable CD, you will need a system (or access to a system) with the following hardware and software tools - An “El Torito-capable” IDE or SCSI CD-ROM drive (with their standard IDE/SCSI interfaces. - An “El Torito-capable” motherboard or SCSI adapter BIOS that supports booting from bootable CDs. - A hexadecimal editor utility. If you have Norton Utilities (version 8.0 or Windows 95), the DISKEDIT.EXE utility is preferred. - A bootable floppy disk (MS-DOS xor DOS 7.0 of Windows 95). You might also use a bootable hard drive. - A hard-disk drive with ample speed and space to hold an ISO 9660 image file for the bootable CD. A SCSI disk is preferred, but a fast EIDE hard drive will also work. At least MB of free space should be on the HDD for the image file. - A CD-R drive (almost always SCSI. - Any CD-R software that can make an ISO 9660 image file. For example, you could use Adaptec’s Easy CD Pro for Windows 95. - A blank CD-R disc (you can’t make a multisession CD bootable).